BBC Radio Plugin for Media Center

For Brits, or anyone else who enjoys BBC radio, there’s now a new plugin for Vista Media Center that lets you listen to BBC Radio from within Media Center: BeebMC. This plugin is pretty cool, but there are a couple of downsides that you should be aware of: 1) it uses Real Player to do the streaming (so you need to have that installed in order to use it) and 2) it doesn’t work with extenders. Both of these problems have to do with the fact that the BBC streams their radio via Real Audio, an unfortunate choice on their part considering how many different options there are today. Still, if you’re interested in listening to the British perspective on things, this could be a fun way to do so using your Media Center PC. You can download the plugin from here.

A little off topic but I was thinking about Microsoft and the BBC earlier today and how MS needs to keep it's finger on the pulse more in foreign territories like the UK and developments in broadcasting.

Take for example the new BBC and ITV (britain's two biggest broadcasters) service Freesat which is Satellite TV without the subscription fees- in high def too. Problem at the moment for many people, especially the early adopters, is that there is no PVR for the service at present and we like PVRs as much as the next couch potato. PCs seem an obvious candidate as they already sell in some cases with Satellite tuner cards and a software update may allow the EPG to be read by the Vista Media Center.

I can't help but feel that MS could of actually found AND filled a gap in the market and made some very useful allies in broadcasting here if they had moved fast and made the service available today! Instead Media Center remains an option for only the few people willing to have more hassle than it is worth frankly. I do think that if Microsoft wants Media Center to ever take off they can't rely on the techniques that have served them so well in the past- bundling and the like. This is the absolute example of "software + services" that Microsoft keeps trying to promote but in this case EVERY country has services unique to itself and MS really needs to get some people working with them in each region otherwise they will be destined to fail- Media Centers at this point are only a valid option in the USA which is great and everything but where change is happening, like here in the UK, they really could have had something easilly.

A little off topic but I was thinking about Microsoft and the BBC earlier today and how MS needs to keep it's finger on the pulse more in foreign territories like the UK and developments in broadcasting.

Take for example the new BBC and ITV (britain's two biggest broadcasters) service Freesat which is Satellite TV without the subscription fees- in high def too. Problem at the moment for many people, especially the early adopters, is that there is no PVR for the service at present and we like PVRs as much as the next couch potato. PCs seem an obvious candidate as they already sell in some cases with Satellite tuner cards and a software update may allow the EPG to be read by the Vista Media Center.

I can't help but feel that MS could of actually found AND filled a gap in the market and made some very useful allies in broadcasting here if they had moved fast and made the service available today! Instead Media Center remains an option for only the few people willing to have more hassle than it is worth frankly. I do think that if Microsoft wants Media Center to ever take off they can't rely on the techniques that have served them so well in the past- bundling and the like. This is the absolute example of "software + services" that Microsoft keeps trying to promote but in this case EVERY country has services unique to itself and MS really needs to get some people working with them in each region otherwise they will be destined to fail- Media Centers at this point are only a valid option in the USA which is great and everything but where change is happening, like here in the UK, they really could have had something easilly.

The strange thing really is the plug-in developer's decision to use the Real Player streams as the BBC Radio streams are also available in Windows Media format. I regularly stream their content using media player.

The strange thing really is the plug-in developer's decision to use the Real Player streams as the BBC Radio streams are also available in Windows Media format. I regularly stream their content using media player.

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